There's a sentence almost nobody can say about their own life. I died, and I was sent back with instructions. Today's guest can say it, and what she learned in those seventy days changed everything about how she leads, loves, and works.

Welcome to The Dignity Room, the podcast for the woman who quietly holds it all together. I'm joined today by Holly Porter, a seventeen time bestselling author, international speaker, serial entrepreneur, and founder of the International Retreat Association, setting the global standard for an industry nobody had organized before.

Before any of this, Holly's life looked like most of ours. Busy, and proud of it. She raised eight children while running three or four companies at a time and built a forty year hairdressing career. She wasn't an unhealthy person, a cold once a year if that. So when COVID put her in the hospital for seventy days and she had a near-death experience, it took someone fiercely independent and made her unable to do anything for herself at all.

When she died, she wasn't given the choice to stay or come back. She was sent back, with instructions. Start a nonprofit. Don't partner with a company she'd been considering. She calls it her life Bible, handed to her with the ending already written, her job now just to write the pages in between.

Coming home didn't mean coming back to peace right away. Holly calls the two years that followed her two years of hell. She expected people to hold her tighter after almost losing her. Instead she felt herself repelling nearly everyone, kids included, while still deeply sick. A hypnosis session, much later, recovered four words from the other side, words that would have changed those two years if she'd remembered them sooner. Love them where they're at. Not change them, not fix them. Just love them where they're at, and let go of wanting someone to be further along than they are.

Out of that period came a motto she still lives by. Better is better. Not perfect, not fixed, just what can I do today that's better than yesterday. She built her mornings around it, replacing old hustle with pause, intention, and self advocacy.

What Holly built next grew directly out of everything dying taught her. She founded the International Retreat Association, serving an ecosystem of two to three million retreat leaders, venues, and service providers with no professional home until now. What separates a transformational retreat from a nice location starts with the leader, one who still goes to their own retreats and keeps investing in their own growth.

We talked about her SHIFT framework, built from what dying taught her about surrender, hope, intuition, faith, and transformation, and her book, Near Death SHIFT. Her 2026 Retreat Industry Trend Report is free to download.

Three things to take from this conversation. Understand: near-death clarity isn't required to ask what you're here to do, you can ask now, without waiting for a crisis to answer it. Understand: love them where they're at isn't passive, it's what stops two years of hell from happening, because judgment keeps you both stuck. Try one thing: next time you want someone further along, say it to yourself first. Love them where they're at.

If this conversation reached something in you, that's exactly what the Dignity Queens room is built to hold. It's free, women only: short resources before your coffee's done, a monthly live call, and threads where one honest line always gets an answer. No card, nothing waiting at the end. Come in here: https://www.dignityroom.com/dignityqueens.

Her free gift, the 2026 Retreat Industry Trend Report, covers the top retreat destinations worldwide:

► https://go.internationalretreatassociation.com/ira-retreat-report

International Retreat Association:

► https://internationalretreatassociation.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hollyporter/

You were never lost. No one ever showed you the way. Until now. This is The Dignity Room. I'll see you next Tuesday.

There's a belief running your life that you've never once said out loud, and you've never tested whether it's even true. Today I'll show you exactly what that belief is, where it came from, and what it's costing you.

Welcome to The Dignity Room, the podcast for the woman who quietly holds it all together. This episode is about why you keep making yourself smaller than you are, on purpose, without ever deciding to.

You've probably never called it dimming. You'd call it staying easy to live with. Here's what it looks like. You have something good to say, a promotion, an idea that worked, and before it leaves your mouth, you've already trimmed it. "It's not a big deal." "I got lucky." The sentence comes out smaller than the thing that happened. It feels like personality. It isn't. It's a rule.

Psychologist Dana Crowley Jack named this pattern in 1991 and called it self-silencing: muting your own voice, your own needs, your own good news, to protect a relationship's sense of calm. Somewhere back, staying slightly below kept things calm, so you kept doing it, and never went back to check if it still needed to.

Here's the cost, if nothing changes. It's not dramatic. Nothing breaks. What happens is quieter than that. The gap between what you're actually capable of and what you let yourself have keeps widening, and you don't register it as loss. You register it as who you are. "I'm just not that ambitious." You start explaining the rule as a value instead of naming it as a rule.

Here's the part almost nobody says out loud. He didn't ask you to shrink your story. He's not cruel. He's habituated, and so are you. You built this rule together without either of you saying a word about it. That's exactly why it's hard to catch. Nobody at that table is watching for it. You'd be the only one.

Picture it at dinner. Your partner asks how your day was. You have something real to report. And what comes out is, "It was fine. Same as usual." Trimmed down to a size that won't disturb the room, so automatically you barely notice.

So here's what catching it looks like. There's usually a small, physical thing right before you trim a sentence down. A pull in the chest. A held breath. The half second where the true sized version is right there, and you reach past it for the smaller one instead. That half second is the rule executing. You don't have to change what comes out of your mouth yet. The only job this week is to catch that half second once, and let the noticing be the whole win.

Three things to take with you. Understand: dimming isn't personality, it's a rule you built once to keep the peace and never retested. Understand: the half second right before you trim a sentence is the rule executing in real time, and you can learn to notice it without acting on it yet. Try one small thing: next time you feel that half second, catch it, just once, without changing a word you say. Not louder. Not bigger. Just no longer automatic.

If you just recognized yourself in this, the hard part is catching it live, before you trim it down. That's what the Dignity Queens room is for. It's free, women only: short resources before your coffee's done, a monthly live call, and threads where one honest line always gets an answer. No card, nothing waiting at the end. Come in here: https://www.dignityroom.com/dignityqueens.

You were never lost. No one ever showed you the way. Until now. This is The Dignity Room. I'll see you next Tuesday.

Lady Jen Du Plessis has been married for 43 years, raised two children and built businesses that generated more than 400 million dollars. For a long time she did all of it at half. Half at dinner. Half on the client call. Half in the car with the kids. In this conversation she tells me about the evening she stood outside a restaurant, looking through the window at her family laughing without her.

Why she refuses the word balance. The small rule she and her husband still keep in the kitchen. And what she means when she says: we did you, we didn't do us. A conversation about work-life balance, boundaries in marriage and being present with the people you love. If you carry a career, a partnership and a household at the same time, and you are tired of being everywhere and fully nowhere, this one is for you.

About Lady Jen Du Plessis Award-winning international speaker, bestselling author, host of three podcasts and the TV show Business on the Vine. Known as the Business Scaling Architect and Sovereign Leadership Mentor.

Her free gift, 7 Strategies to Break Through, is a short self-assessment of your boundaries, your core values and the people you spend your time with: https://api.totalallinonesolutions.com/widget/form/fziTVySFNEAkiFcy0RsK

Free for you: The Dignity Queens, a women-only room with short courses, a morning meditation and one live call a month. No card, nothing waiting at the end: https://dignityroom.com/dignityqueens